Category: Vedas

It is a humble work … now in the making : a free-flow rendering in English of sentiments inspired by Sanskrit hymns Arya masters expressed several millennia ago, when life had resumed in the Indian subcontinent after the most recent Ice Age. The verses released therein are not as pithy as their Vedic hymn yet, though not put to test, are intended to have similar content in terms of felt truth projected in their inspiration uttered then, either sung by river banks, in secluded monasteries, or during public ceremonies and discourses.

Veda texts are now easily available in print and on the web, both as Sanskrit original and their numerous translations, with and without commentaries of authors past and present. What brought me to the task was a personal realisation of the self-integrated sentiment of immense beauty and truth they express. It was not long before I could also fathom how they have been coloured, tainted rather than tinted, by formal hard-etched concepts of religion that burdens the Western mind, on one hand, and by the intellectual rigour to which modern scholars must necessarily subject these alien verses, on the other.

It is impossible even in imagination for an uniniatiated layman like myself to stand with those masters in hoary past, in their setting, hearing their words, singing along as they fluently intone with barely a pause, and keep pace with the etymological and contextual meaning of expressions crafted into the hymns. What I could hear and feel in them today is the same beauty, truth, longing, love and peace, they carry to this day. Unavoidably, their modern presentations also brought to my experience the discordant religious, intellectual or philosophical hues superimposed on them. Hence the need to reduce at least select Vedic texts to their simple, easy-to-read-and-appreciate form. Only you, dear reader, and others over time, would be able to sound back if the attempt succeeds, and if it works enough to add to the reach these texts have hitherto had among common gentry.

I sincerely seek to obtain your first feel of the impression the work leaves with you. Those who would like to associate with it long term, as an editor or reader, are encouraged to write in.